Packaging tools [Was Re: ITP: Guile 1.5.6]

Charles Wilson cwilson@ece.gatech.edu
Thu Jul 4 15:07:00 GMT 2002


Christopher Faylor wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 04, 2002 at 04:13:10PM -0400, Charles Wilson wrote:
> 
>>The two best candidates right now are probably the cross-tool at 
>>lilypond, or cgf's mknetrel.  Unfortunately, BOTH will require work -- 
>>lilypond's needs to "play better" on native platforms (as does mknetrel, 
>>but mknetrel is closer).
>>
> 
> The last I heard, mknetrel worked fine natively.  I removed all of the
> linux dependencies that I heard of.  There should be no special dependencies
> for things like "readlink" or "getopt" anymore.
> 


Great to hear.  I haven't tried it myself for a few months -- but I did 
see a few messages about it on the list.


>>BOTH need to be heavily documented.
>>
> 
> True, mknetrel certainly isn't documented.



[snip]

> 
> I have been accepting suggestions and incorporating patches in mknetrel.
> 
> There's no reason why the stuff in "extra" couldn't also reside in the
> source directory although there is sometimes a chicken-egg problem when
> the functions in extra change things like the package name which is used
> to find the source directory.  But those cases are the exception.


Cool.  Your design seems pretty sound to me -- but the last time I 
looked at it, it seemed to be a bit tricky to extricate the "extra" 
stuff.  Plus, the chicken/egg problem you mention.


> I'm pretty happy with the mknetrel functionality.  It allows me to build
> most packages without actually modifying anything.  If people want to
> try it, I'll entertain modifications, i.e., I'll consider it supported.


Glad to hear it.  Is this a change?  (And I hope you weren't being 
"pushed" by me.  I was actually trying to hint that someone else should 
'support' it instead; you've certainly got enough on your plate with 
just cygwin, gcc, and binutils alone, not to mention the other 30 packages)

As far as a "standard" tool for packaging, the "right" answer may be 
"leave well enough alone for now".  It's not *really* that important 
that every cygwin package be 'packaged' the same way -- you (and perhaps 
others) use mknetrel; Jan uses cross-tools; I use method 2; Corinna does 
some other magic...big deal.

But a well documented tool that is both native and cross compatible, 
like mknetrel, would be nice...

--Chuck



More information about the Cygwin-apps mailing list